Gene Transfection of Mammalian Cells Using
Membrane Sandwich Electroporation
Brian E. Henslee*, Zhengzheng Fei*, Shengnian Wang†, Yubing Xie†, Chee Guan Koh*, L.
James Lee*†
*
Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and †NSF Nanoscale Science
and Engineering Center for Affordable Nanoengineering of Polymer Biomedical Devices,
The Ohio State University, 140 West 19th Avenue, Columbus OH 43210
To avoid safety issues such as immune response and cytotoxicity associated with
viruses and liposomes, physical methods have been widely used for either in vivo or ex
vivo gene delivery. They are, however, very invasive and often provide limited
efficiency. Using pEGFP and pSEAP plasmids and NIH 3T3 fibroblasts as models, we
demonstrate a new electroporation-based gene delivery method, called membrane
sandwich electroporation (MSE). The MSE method is able to provide better gene
confinement near the cell surface to facilitate genes transport into the cells, and thus
shows significant improvement over transgene expression of mammalian cells compared
to current electroporation techniques.